Corvus marianae Mathews

Lecroy, Mary, 2014, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 12. Passeriformes: Ploceidae, Sturnidae, Buphagidae, Oriolidae, Dicruridae, Callaeidae, Grallinidae, Corcoracidae, Artamidae, Cracticidae, Ptilonorhynchidae, Cnemophilidae, Paradisaeidae, And Corvidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2014 (393), pp. 1-165 : 130-131

[ Corvus marianae Mathews ]

Mathews (1911a: 326) introduced C. marianae as a replacement name for C. australis Gould, 1865 , which at that time Mathews considered to be preoccupied by C. australis Gmelin, 1788 . Vaurie, in Blake and Vaurie (1962: 276 fn.) acting as first revisor, selected Gmelin’s (1788: 377) name Corvus australis , a synonym of Cuculus (= monasa) niger Müller, 1776, to have priority over Gmelin’s (1788: 365) name Corvus australis , described in the same publication. This action established precedence between the two names (ICZN, 1999: 30, Art. 24.2.1), Gmelin’s name established on page 365 becoming the junior name and permanently invalid (ICZN, 1999: 59, Art. 57.2). The next available name for the Australian Raven was Corvus coronoides Vigors and Horsfield, 1827 . This action placed both Corvus australis Gould, 1865 , and Corvus marianae Mathews, 1911 , in the synonymy of Corvus coronoides . As a replacement name, the type of marianae is the same as that of australis .

Nevertheless, Mathews (1912a: 443) listed his specimen (catalog no. 7084) as the type of C. marianae . This specimen is now AMNH 674677, sex?, collected at Gosford, New South Wales, Australia, in September 1892, from the Thorpe collection. From the Mathews Collection (no. 7084) via the Rothschild Collection. This specimen has no nomenclatural standing (ICZN, 1999: 78, Art. 72.7).

Hartert (1929a: 53) listed this type ‘‘as quoted in 1912’’ and commented: ‘‘Originally this specimen was not sexed, but someone put subsequently ‘s’ on the label.’’ This appears to have been the case, but a female symbol has been added in pencil to the Rothschild label, on which Hartert added: ‘‘Evidently ♀, not s.’’ Because this specimen bears a Rothschild type label, it is retained in the AMNH type collection with an added label to explain its lack of nomenclatural standing.

The types of the following three Mathews names came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. They were loaned to Ian Rowley in Australia in 1965 by special permission of Dean Amadon, Chairman of the Department of Ornithology, but were lost in the mail on their return to AMNH. Attempts to trace them were unsuccessful. I have provided below the information on the original types, gleaned from the literature. After the unfortunate loss of the types, CSIRO, courtesy of Richard Schodde, provided AMNH with topotypes for two of the three types, and a topotype for the third was present in AMNH. These topotypes remain in the type collection at AMNH, marked as such. Information on these topotypes is included within brackets below.